Best founders talk to customers even before they create a product, they talk to customers throughout the whole lifetime of the product.

Who to talk to?

1. People on your network
2. Coworkers
3. People you don't know
   1. Linkedin
   2. Reddit
   3. Slack
   4. Facebook
   5. In-person

Mock startup

Author describes how he would launch a startup if he had an idea.

Hypothesis

Companies want to reduce their carbon emissions but for whatever reason don't do that

Steps

1. Interview potential customers
2. Learn about the problems and motivations around carbon emissions
3. Understand what an MVP could look like

Who to talk to?

• Founders, CEOs, CFOs at different-sized companies
• People working at companies with titles including "carbon", "climate", etc

What to learn?

• Do the companies you work for care about carbon emissions?
• Why do you care / not care?
• Who in the company cares the most about it?

How to interview?

• Video / phone / in-person
• Build rapport
• Don't introduce the product
• Listen, don't talk
• Ask open-ended questions ("tell me about that?")
• Record the interview or take notes

Specific questions

1. Tell me how you do X today.
2. What is the hardest thing about doing X?
3. Why is it hard?
4. How often do you have to do X?
5. Why is it important for your company to do X?

Follow-up Questions

• What do you mean by that?
• Can you tell me more about that?
• Why is that important to you?

Do not ask questions

• Will you use our product? — they'll say yes.
• Which features would make the product better? — it's not their work, it's yours.
• Yes-no questions — not enough information.
• How would a better product look like? — they are not engineers, managers, you have to understand it.
• Two questions at the same time. — it's confusing.

Focus on problems, not features

Users usually have good problems and bad solutions. It's natural to want to ask about features but you must only ask about their problems and decide how to solve them yourself.

Users don't have incentive to say no to features

If you ask about multiple features they'll probably just say yes to everything.

Next Steps

1. Synthesize your learnings
2. Create a problem/solution hypothesis
3. Start sketching an MVP — do it as fast as you can.
4. Test an MVP on the same users. See if users value the solution enough to pay for it.

Is solving this problem valuable

1. Are people paying money for solutions in this space today?
2. Have you tried to solve the problem on your own? Spreadsheets and google docs are competitors to many-many startups actually.
3. Some customers are always easier than others to do researches on. E.g. plumbers don't change their tools often, but startups do.

How to show demo?

• Show your feature on your own phone, with an unreleased feature. Don't tell them how to use it! Just watch what they are trying to do.
• Keep these interviewees in the process, make them special, create a discord/slack/whatsapp group, keep showing it to them.